Thursday, August 21, 2014

When you sweep up the broken pieces

Jerry stood at the sink washing up a few things in the
kitchen (bless him), when I heard a tinkling of glass. "What's that?" I called from my office.

"A glass broke.""You okay?""Sure."

If we’d only known then what we know now, we would have
called that event in literary terms a foreshadowing.

A few moments later, the next thing I heard from my office
sounded like a car wreck in the kitchen.

I leaped from my desk and ran in there. “What happened?” I
said staring at one of the biggest piles of broken glass I’d ever seen in a
house.

He pointed to a lower cabinet. “I opened that door there,
and dishes seemed to leap from the cabinet. It’s like they were breaking
on the way down.”

A movie reel flicked in my mind—something like a computer
generated scene from a sci-fi movie of fragmented glass dispersing in slo mo.

I stooped to look at the glass and couldn’t figure out what
it had been before it was this. Casserole dishes? Serving trays?

Sure enough, I noticed the
shelf where whatever it was had been also had broken glass in it, as if the dishes had really started to break in the cabinet. I didn’t have
any idea how that happened. But I knew what it meant.

We had to take every dish, pot, and tray from the top and
bottom shelves of the cabinet and wash it to make sure no shards of glass were
on them.

Hadn’t planned to do that.

Didn’t want to do it.

And yet, that’s what we did.

We also, swept and reswept to remove any glass from the
floor.

Tired.

Sometimes, you just have to drop everything and do what it
takes whether you want to or not. Spiritually speaking, we’re going to face some times when stuff gets broken and people get broken, and we won’t have the answers we want either, but God does. We have to trust that if we do what we can to help clean things up, God’s doing His part. Because Jesus came for shattered lives, and
broken hearts, and fragmented souls. My friend Cheryl used to say, "People are more important than projects." And so, we drop whatever is in our hands to help, to love, to care for those who are suffering from brokenness.

I still don’t know
what that pile of glass was.

But, as we sweep up the pieces, not knowing all that’s broken
or even how it got that way, we know the One who does know—the One who was “ .
. . sent to bind up the brokenhearted” (Isaiah 61:1).I guess I'm going to be on the look-out for some new casserole dishes. Or serving trays. Or both. When have you had to drop everything and sweep up the pieces?

2 comments:

Bev, such a great post. Broken glass, broken hearts, broken lives. Life is full of the unexpected, but thanks be, every broken piece fits into God's hands. Thank you for sharing this today.Blessings, Beth

“Watch for me,” my then ten-year-old sister, Tammy, said as she headed out to the basement of our childhood home to retrieve some ...

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About Bev

Beverly Varnado is an award winning novelist,screenwriter, and blogger. Her screenplay, GiveMy Love to the Chestnut Trees, has been a finalist for the Kairos Prize and is now under option with Elevating Entertainment Motion Pictures. Her novels are Home to Currahee and Give My Love to the Chestnut Trees, which placed in the top ten for Christian Writer's Guild Operation First Novel. Her blog, One Ringing Bell, is now in itsseventh year with almost seven hundred posts. Her work has been featured on World Magazine Radio, The Upper Room Magazine, and she was recently featured in Southern Distinctions Magazine as one of seventeen authors writing about Georgia.Find out more at www.BeverlyVarnado.com

Why "One Ringing Bell?"

From Ezekiel 28:33-35, "Make pomegranates of blue, purple and scarlet yarn around the hem of the robe, with gold bells between them. The gold bells and the pomegranates are to alternate around the hem of the robe. Aaron must wear it when he ministers." The pomegranates symbolize the word of God and the bells, the going forth of that word. As the sound of the bells was heard when the priest, Aaron, ministered, my desire is to ring out the word wherever and whenever possible--to be "One Ringing Bell."